Topic: Aesthetics

Quotes

There can, therefore be no rule according to which any one is to be compelled to recognize anything as beautiful.#Quoted in Tyler Cowen, “Entrepreneurship, Austrian Economics, and the Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry” (2003)

For even as science has to ascend from the phenomena to the investigation of their inherent order, . . . so also it is the vocation of art, not merely to observe everything visible and audible, to apprehend it, and reproduce it artistically, but much more to discover in those natural forms the order of the beautiful, and, enriched by this higher knowledge, to produce a beautiful world that transcends the beautiful of nature.#

One may share to the full the distaste for the ostentation, the bad taste, and the wastefulness of many of the new rich and yet recognize that, if we were to prevent all that we disliked, the unforeseen things that might be thus prevented would probably outweigh the bad.#

A human figure with two arms on the right shoulder and hip and two legs on the left shoulder and hip would strike us as rather off-putting, not because it was asymmetrical (it would not be), but because its symmetry violated another to which our eye has become accustomed. Similarly, the preference for one order over another, one rule over another, one equality over another does not in any obvious manner spring from the depths of human nature, even if the preference for order over disorder may be plausibly held to do so. The choice of a particular order, symmetry, rule or equality over its alternatives needs either habit, custom, or the force of substantive argument to explain it; if it is the former, political theory gets swallowed up in history (which might be a well-deserved fate) and if it is the latter, we will be back to square one, making derivative cases for a liberty-securing, a utility-maximizing or a justice-dispensing equality rather than proving the claim that equality for its own sake is intrinsically desirable. #

The quality of an artistic period is not the result of the height and quantity of good average achievements but only of the height of the very best achievement.#
What separates Nietzsche from all socialist evaluations is most distinctly characterized by the fact that, for him, only the quality of mankind has any significance, so that a single highest example determines the value of an era, whereas for socialism only the degree of diffusion of desirable conditions and values is relevant.#
Whoever lives in direct contact with nature and knows no other form of life may enjoy its charm subjectively, but he lacks that distance from nature that is the basis for aesthetic contemplation and the root of that quiet sorrow, that feeling of yearning estrangement and of a lost paradise that characterizes the romantic response to nature.#
Artistic realism makes the same mistake as scientific realism by assuming that it can dispense with an a priori, with a form that—springing from the inclinations and needs of our nature—provides a robe or a metamorphosis for the world of our senses. This transformation that reality suffers on its way to our consciousness is certainly a barrier between us and its immediate existence, but is at the same time the precondition for our perception and representation of it.#